Thursday, March 21, 2013

Could the greater portion of the internet be operating like
a fast food restaurant? Offering quick, tasty bites of data and entertainment
that really ends up providing nothing beneficial to the brain?...no insight, no
thought provocation, no improvement in mental acuity?

Could the presence of the internet be rewiring the circuitry
of human brains to want to jump around from one piece of information to the
next? The internet may be making it more difficult for the average brain to
focus on any particular topic for a protracted interval of time. No one can say
whether the human brain has evolved to deal with this constant, instantaneous
access to information and entertainment. Are more and more individuals
disengaging from reading lengthy books to instead jump from site to site on the
internet?

I think that some brains may be more equipped to handle the
presence of the internet than others. People who naturally have the ability to
be disciplined and delay gratification, individuals who tend to not procrastinate
in their projects and pursuits and don’t jump down rabbit trails of inanity
(web surfing) will be more able to use the internet in a beneficial manner
(that is, use it in ways that help them achieve their goals).

The internet may be acting as a giant selecting mechanism
that hinders many individuals (that already have an innate tendency to be more impulsive or have a decreased attention span) from completing their life’s goals. How could it
do this? Perhaps it is sucking copious quantities of time from such a
person—time that could have been spent exploring more innovative and creative
pursuits, inventing something or exercising.

On the contrary, the internet offers many individuals an
enhanced means to be creative and explore opportunities that would have been
inaccessible to them otherwise. The
internet allows many to make a passive income which aids their survival.
Perhaps, without the internet to diminish the sense of boredom, some
individuals would be off pillaging, raping, watching reality television shows, or going to church.

The internet is still a very new phenomenon in human
history. It will help many and hurt many. Like the technology of genetically
modified organisms, the internet is a technology—a tool—that can be used for
good and bad purposes.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Many of us would love to have a better memory. I surmise
that a strong, focused attention span allows for the development of better
memory. Yet, what causes a person to
have a strong attention span in the first place? What makes a person pay
stronger, longer attention to some phenomena and not to others?

I want to suggest that phenomena that relates to your
person and identity, things that you find peculiar or interesting, things that
aggravate you and things that you despise, will entertain your attention span
longer than other kinds of phenomena. Perhaps it isn’t just the length of the
attention span but how deeply (thoroughly?) we embed the information in our
brains and how much wiring our brain devotes to a specific piece or collection
of data.

The length of one’s attention span seems also to be important because if you can have a longer attention span for a particular area
of knowledge, you will be able to encode and store more of the information
about the topic; this results in enhanced memory retrieval.

Furthermore, it seems that anything that evokes a fiery
emotional response will also form a more trenchant, recallable memory. One of the problems for developing a better memory in other
domains of knowledge (that are entirely new) may be that instead of generating
an emotional response, they elicit an indifferent response. If you find an area of knowledge, say,
politics, to “boil your blood” you probably have a better grasp on this subject
than someone who has more of a flat, indifferent response to the subject.

Perhaps the material
you are learning bores you or doesn’t pique your interest or excite your
thought processes enough to establish focus.
This past quarter I’ve experienced just that. As I reflect on the current
subject matter, I see that it doesn’t interest me and it doesn’t relate to any
experiences I’ve ever had so my focus and memory (and thus learning) capacity
is negatively impacted. Passing the
class matters—and so far, I’m doing that, but for me, longer-term retention is
always the ultimate goal

If only there could be a method (or pill) to make us more
interested (or more emotionally affected or rewarded?) by a subject so that
focus and memory were better played out.